Entries in history
(223)

The History of World Records from NYTimes.com shows how the world record in a number of Summer Olympic events has progressively been beaten over the last 100 years. In this chart, the Men's 100m Freestyle record was beaten three times this year improving the world record by 0.45 seconds. Similar events are all charted together, so you can see other freestyle events on the same chart.

The Medal Count Map from the NYTimes.com show the total number of medals each country has won in every olympics since 1896. Choose a year on the timeline to animate the graphic. Rolling your mouse over a country will show the breakdown of Gold, Silver and Bronze medals and clicking will bring up a complete list of the events and medal winners.

The group at the NY Times online has been working overtime to create a bunch of infographics as part of their coverage of the 2008 Olympics. I'm going to highlight them this week with many of the graphics they've created. Their graphics are coming our rapid-fire just like the events in China.

First up is an Olympic Torch History graphic, highlight the torch designs since 1936 for both the Summar and Winter Olympic Games. Roll over each torch to see deatils behind the design.

First, I'm not pushing any particular political agenda. There's considerable debate around this chart, so I don't want to start any arguments. The debate isn't around the validity of the data, but about how it's being presented. The information is freely available from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Bureau of the Public Debt.

Second, I like that this chart takes a simple bar chart and adds a few more layers of information. At its root, this is a timeline of the increase in the national debt based on the federal budget by year. Then layered on top of that are the presidents in office that year, some color coding, the political party controlling the White House and highlights for record years.

Third, just to share the reasons for the debate. This is a great example of data being visualized with a specific agenda in mind. Obviously, this is a chart framed to make Republicans look bad, and Democrats look good. The debate centers around a few issues like programs started by one President will carry into the term of another President and more importantly that the political party controlling Congress actually has more impact on the federal budget than the President does.

NameTrends.net is a fantastic interactive site that charts and maps the popularity of baby names over the last century in the U.S. You can look at the most popular names, or search for specific names to see their results. The chart above shows the top 20 baby names from the 2000's decade (10 boys and 10 girls). You can see that those names also had some popularity at the end of the 19th century.

The site also allows you to map the name popularity by state. The slider across the top allows you to see the geographic distribution by year.

Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) was a German artist with a political activist focus. Many of his infographics, as well as his Isotype project to create a universal set of icons for signs, are available at www.gerdarntz.org. This infographic poster shows the New York City population explosion from 25,000 in 1767 to 9.5 million in 1930.

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

Richard Dawson from What's Next (www.nowandnext.com) created the Extinction Timeline with his predictions of what products and services will disappear in the next 50 years. Also available as a PDF here. Here are a few highlights: